SHOW BUSINESS

A Hollywood Mis-Education

After four decades in Hollywood, the author—a director, screenwriter, actor, and producer—has learned that you can’t: (a) stay mad at Robert Downey Jr., (b) go wrong with Robert De Niro, or (c) swear when you lose the Oscar. Plus: why he and Alec Baldwin decided to color outside the lines.

Why make movies? For someone who has been writing and directing and—to a lesser degree—acting in and producing them for 40 years, it is a question the continuing exploration of which is essential to maintaining the energy to forge ahead. Where did it begin? Only by rummaging through years of notes did it occur to me that the impulse to become a filmmaker started two decades earlier than I had even suspected, in the films my father shot with his latest-model 8-mm. camera in Kodak color. There was no sound, so when we gathered to view the unedited result all we heard was the wheezing syncopated clicks emanating from the projector, which served only to enrich the already hypnotic, dreamlike quality of the images. I would stare at these moving images and wonder how “I” could be both the person on the screen and, at the same time, the physical being in the living room watching that person on the screen. How could “I” be “he”? This question is perhaps more likely to prick the supple mind of a six-year-old than to disturb the more settled consciousness of an adult, but if it does prick the mind of a six-year-old, will it ever go away?

My next, and last, step before entering the “real” film world was an extension of these dual-identity thoughts. Nine hours after taking a massive dose of pure Sandoz-laboratory LSD-25—this was 1964, my sophomore year at Harvard—I was suddenly possessed by what Heidegger and Kierkegaard had written about as Dread, the fear of … nothing, and the unavoidable knowledge that sanity, as Susan Sontag said, is a cozy lie. I staggered around Cambridge with a loaded .38 and resisted the urge to blow my brains out only because of my suspicion that the current horror would continue perpetually after death. It was eight days before I was acceptably reconstituted by the intravenous injection of a chemical antidote devised and administered by Dr. Max Rinkel, who had brought LSD to America.

In addition to a permanent end to my drug career, I had been provided with a fundamental “subject” if I were ever to discover an art form in which to communicate it: the nature of identity. The self and/or the loss of it. The unpredictable but certain closeness of death.

A Genuine Crisis

My journey to the actual making of movies was determined more by chance than by design. Having emerged from Harvard in 1966, I embarked on a series of adventures, including three years as a lecturer in the English department of the City College of New York. I also developed a profoundly demanding gambling habit, and it was this addiction, along with my teaching experiences, which led to my writing what I intended to be a semi-autobiographical novel called The Gambler. Halfway through it, however, I began seeing and hearing it not as a novel but as a film. So I switched literary gears and wrote it as a screenplay.

When I completed The Gambler in script form, in 1972, I showed it to my best friend, Lucy Saroyan, daughter of the great writer William Saroyan, and an actress studying at the Actors Studio in New York. She told me about a fellow actor she was “sort of going out with,” Marlon Brando. Not literally Brando but “the next Brando”—Bobby De Niro. My lead character’s name was Axel Freed. “Bobby is Axel Freed,” Lucy said.

A few days later, Lucy introduced me to Bob. We connected quickly. I could not have invented a better Axel Freed or a better model for what a serious actor should be.

There was one increasingly nettlesome problem, however. Who was going to direct this movie? I wanted to believe that I should be the one, but never having directed a foot of film I had a difficult time convincing myself, let alone anyone else, that I was the ideal choice. My literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, gave the script to Mike Medavoy, then a movie agent (and later the head of three studios).

“I’m going to get this picture made,” he said with immaculate assurance 30 seconds into our first phone conversation. “And I have the perfect guy to play Axel Freed: Robert Redford.”

“I already have the guy. Bobby De Niro.”

“Never heard of him. You won’t get the picture made without a star.”

“It has to be De Niro.”

“Then you need a star director. Karel Reisz.”

“Who’s Karel Reisz?”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t you know anything about movies? Karel Reisz is the greatest director in England. He and John Schlesinger and Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson and Jack Clayton are the British New Wave. Every studio wants to make a movie with them. I’m going to get you Karel.”

It was my first exposure to a Hollywood player of power, and the lesson was clear: the way to move is on the back of someone who matters until—if that day ever comes—you matter, at which point someone new will be mounting you. Medavoy sent my script to Karel, who, in one of those frequent coincidences in the moviemaking world which resemble the endless accidents of reunion common to the great 19th-century novels, happened to be entertaining Lucy Saroyan. Within a week a deal had been made at Paramount. I flew to London to meet with Karel.

Karel Reisz was 46, a Czech refugee who had landed alone in England when he was 12. His parents had both been killed in Auschwitz. We soon became close, to the point of love. In New York, I introduced him to De Niro, who, I had told him from the first day we met, was Axel Freed. Karel insisted that he have dinner alone with De Niro and promised to call me as soon as it was over.

The phone rang at midnight.

“Jim, you must listen to me very carefully because what I’m about to say may have serious and permanent consequences for both of us—I cannot use this boy.”

“What boy?”

“Your friend, De Niro.”

“That’s impossible. He’s perfect.”

“He has the wrong temperament. He’s too common.”

“That’s insane! Let’s all get together.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t discuss it any further. I want to make the movie you want me to make but not with him.”

My disbelief was matched by De Niro’s frustration when he learned that Karel would not even let him read. He urged that I threaten to quit and predicted that Karel would back down. I told him that it was a hopeless cause and that Karel would abandon the film if I pressed it.

This episode qualified as the first genuine crisis in my cinematic trek. Crises are endemic to all cinematic careers; some are manufactured, some are legitimate, some solvable, some not. This was a genuine crisis that could not be solved—at least not with De Niro. But unlike crises that kill movies, this one led to resolution, in the person of James Caan. Eagerly sought by everyone after his performance as Sonny in The Godfather, Caan became a great Axel Freed, although obviously different from the character De Niro would have created.

Karel remained a communicant until he died, in 2002. He had been my one-man film school. Paradoxically, it was the experience of learning from Karel that made future collaboration with him impossible. Since I was now eager to direct myself, what I needed was not a director but actors and money.

Sideways and Backward

I approached De Niro to play the main character in my next film—which would be my first as director—called Fingers; Jimmy Angelelli was a spirit divided by ambitions as a concert pianist, like his mother, and the gangster affiliations of his father. After a month of indecision I proposed—separately to each of them—that I go with Bob’s best friend, Harvey Keitel. Harvey agreed to play Jimmy and quickly began to astonish me by taking the character into dimensions of darkness well beyond my original imagining.

Fingers had come together as seamlessly as The Gambler. I was, for the moment, blissfully untouched by the frustrations, delays, rejections, and grotesque humiliations which periodically litter the careers of almost everyone in moviemaking. But not for long. The decade after Fingers involved a fair amount of lurching sideways and backward, as I linked myself to the deliberate and lengthily interrupted rhythms of Warren Beatty.

In 1979 Beatty bought a script, Love & Money, which I’d written for him. We induced Pauline Kael, the film critic for The New Yorker, to quit her job and come on board as the producer with the expectation that Beatty would act in the lead role and I would direct. Long delays and occasional disputes were resolved by Beatty’s flying off to Finland to direct and star in Reds, Kael’s returning to The New Yorker, and my making Love & Money with the wrong actor, Ray Sharkey.

So as collaborators Beatty and I got off to a delayed actual beginning. When movement toward our destiny resumed, in 1984, it was in harmony with yet another collaboration, this one ultimately with Robert Downey Jr. I had written a script called The Pick-Up Artist, which was an attempt simultaneously to laugh at sexual compulsion and to show how, in the right circumstance, it can lead to romantic communion. The role was written for Beatty, but he was reaching a midpoint in his life, and his reluctance to portray a character whose erotic compulsions propelled the narrative (not unlike his role in Shampoo) gradually became clear. But he was excited by the script and bought it with a plan to produce it with me as the director.

Warren set the movie up at Fox, which his closest executive friend, Barry Diller, was running. Molly Ringwald agreed to play Randy, an addicted gambler and daughter of an alcoholic father, played by Dennis Hopper. But who was the real collaborator to be? We still needed an actor to play the lead, Jack Jericho.

“What about De Niro?” Beatty suggested.

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

De Niro was intrigued and eager, and we decided to hold a reading of the script at his loft, on Hudson Street. He brought along Marty Scorsese for another opinion. The reading seemed to go well. Marty laughed hysterically in all the right places, and when we finished, he said he loved it.

The next morning I had an uneasy feeling when I woke up. Warren called me and asked how I felt.

“Strange.”

“You know why you feel strange? Because you realized—apparently unconsciously—that this character should be 20, not 45.

“I can’t believe you’re saying this,” I admitted. “It’s as if every word were coming from my own brain.”

“You’re going to have to make the call.”

“Oh shit. There’s a whole history already with Bob and me. Can’t you call him?”

“Absolutely not. It’s your movie.”

“O.K. I’ll call him now.”

I hung up and paced around my living room, planning the wording of my call.

The phone rang. It was De Niro.

“Listen, Jim. I’ve been thinking and—I’ll still do the movie if you want me to, but to be honest about it, this character should be much younger. Like 20. That’s what I think.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” I began, and continued with a precise rendition of the conversation I’d just had with Beatty. We joked about the sudden and radical shift. Mutual enthusiasm had melted into mutual relief.

Downey

The moment Robert Downey Jr. walked into my office I knew he was the guy—or, more precisely, I knew that I wanted to use him even though he was clearly not the guy. Cruising—looking to pick up girls with a cocky self-confidence—was not in Downey’s repertoire. But, like Jack Jericho, he was a slippery character, a young man without a centered self, a game player who lied and broke rules with a terrific quickness, and he displayed an open-minded penchant for the most extreme reaches of obscenity. Most important, he had about him a casual sense of doom. He seemed to be someone happy to crack a joke, laugh, and then coolly skip off to his own slaughter.

The collaboration with Downey on The Pick-Up Artist had its exciting moments, some of them occurring when the camera was rolling, others when it was not. The final one took place on what was to be the last of three extra shooting days we had been granted by Fox to fill in some holes which had emerged during editing. Cast and crew were assembled at the designated location in downtown Los Angeles, but Downey was missing. Frantic calls were made everywhere. Production assistants were sent to check out the house in Beverly Hills he had rented from Desi Arnaz Jr. By early afternoon, the decision was made to take an insurance claim. We would have to do without the new scenes. So extreme was my rage that I switched back and forth between fear and hope that something awful had befallen him. I decided to examine the house for myself. I drove to it and rang every bell and pounded on every door. There was no response. I found a rock and smashed the window of the kitchen door, reached around, and let myself in. I moved quickly, calling out Downey’s name, to no effect. Then, suddenly, I found myself standing three feet from his naked body, lying flat on the living-room floor. I shouted his name and tried to rouse him but got no response. I called a doctor, who arrived promptly, examined Downey, and then administered medication.

“Five minutes later and he would have been dead,” the doctor said dramatically.

After effusive thanks and receiving instructions for Downey’s care, I saw the doctor to the door. Then I approached Downey, who was now sitting on the sofa in his underwear, gazing at me with a look of displeasure.

“I’m disappointed in you,” he said.

“You’re disappointed in me! Are you out of your fucking mind!”

“No. Because I know what you’re thinking. You’re assuming the worst—that I was into some drug thing and that’s what made me late.”

“Late! You didn’t show up at all!”

“Do you want to know the truth?”

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ!”

“You know what? Now I’m not even going to tell you.”

“O.K. What’s the truth?” I asked, perversely curious to see what Downey would invent.

“I had dinner at Carlos and Charlie’s last night and they served bad chicken and I got food poisoning.”

I tried—unsuccessfully—to suppress a laugh.

“You see? I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “O.K.—I insist that you call the restaurant right now and ask the manager how many people called in this morning to complain about the bad chicken. And I want to hear his reaction.”

Dutifully, I called Carlos and Charlie’s and asked to speak to the manager. “Excuse me. I have a friend who got food poisoning from the chicken you served last night and I’d like to know how many other people have called in to complain today.”

“Who the hell is this?” the manager screamed. “What are you talking about! No one has ever gotten sick from our food!”

I hung up and looked at Downey, whose expression could be charted somewhere between satisfaction and triumph.

“Well?”

“Well, what?” I said. “He denied it categorically.”

“Of course he denied it,” Downey exclaimed with exasperation. “What did you think he was going to say? He has to deny it.”

I waited for a few moments to see if Downey would crack up in the hope of an eyelash of empathetic camaraderie but—stone-faced—he was determined to play out the scene to the hilt.

Beatty

My next collaboration with Downey, Two Girls and a Guy, in which each of us inspired the best work in the other, would have to wait for 11 years. I was, in the meantime, transported into a different realm of filmmaking: the lavishly studio-financed, award-based parallel reality of the now all-but-vanished Old Hollywood. This adventure, which resulted in Bugsy—it won the Golden Globe for best picture in 1992 and received 10 Academy Award nominations, including one for my screenplay—was generated by its star and producer, Warren Beatty.

When Beatty approached me in 1984 to write Bugsy for him, I convinced myself that the offer involved directing as well. An “outside” director would be an offense to how I had learned to work. Still, this was to be Big Business—Sony’s movie of the year—and I secretly suspected that Warren, who subscribed to the “Three Intelligences” theory, would not be content to forgo the missing part. So when I turned in the script I was not shocked that Barry Levinson (Diner, The Natural, Rain Man) was appointed as director in my stead.

Rather than looking at it as a unique chance to explore a fresh cinematic methodology, a trip to another country, I viewed it as a slight and a hint of more slights to come. I decided that, in the spirit of Bugsy Siegel himself, a frequent killer, I would murder Barry Levinson in pre-production and thereby induce Beatty to come to his senses. Was this an actual idea or a “movie” idea? It is a mark of how far along I had come to erasing the line between life and film, actor and role, fact and fiction, that for several days I didn’t see any potential drawbacks to my plan other than the possibility of getting caught. Only when I met Barry in person and developed an immediate mutual regard and affection, which has increased with time, did I realize that in this alternative universe of moviemaking the trio would be a superior idea to the duo.

The experience of Bugsy was like a drug, with its leisurely lunches in Warren’s trailer, frequent visits from executives, and ongoing consultation sessions with the various departments during shooting. There was an intoxicating sense of *Über-*reality to it, dangerous for a DNA-driven addict, like your correspondent, with a secret weakness for splendor. And yet having always insisted on being the ultimately accountable party, and knowing that this time it was someone else—Beatty—on whose shoulders the edifice rested, I felt like a bit of a cheat.

Of course, there were daily and substantial periods of intimacy among Warren, Barry, and me—and Bugsy, finally, feels like an interior film played against the background of broad-ranging chaotic events. But the new writing I did every day was writing-on-demand, and my feeling of being a visitor, however essential and wonderfully treated, never went away.

I had an epiphany at the 1992 Academy Awards ceremony. Nominees are seated in the same area as the opponents in their category. Is there a more ludicrous human inauthenticity on display for global consumption than when Academy nominees, upon hearing someone else’s name called out as the winner of the award they presumably came to accept, leap to their feet in feigned ecstasy, throwing their arms around the person they, as often as not, feel like stabbing, or at least robbing of the statue they had hoped for?

When Callie Khouri was announced as the winner of the best-original-screenplay award for Thelma & Louise, I was well prepared to resist even a minuscule temptation to politeness, let alone congratulatory exuberance. I uttered an imprecation—I believe it was “Get the fuck out of here!”—and strode off to the men’s room, where I was greeted by a man I didn’t know.

“Bad form, big fella,” he said.

I suggested with as much casual restraint as I could muster that perhaps he would like me to dunk his head in a toilet bowl. He left without replying. I looked into the mirror and chatted with myself for a few moments.

“I don’t think this is where you want to be,” I said quietly. “Or who. So watch out. Use this occasion. Use it often and use it well.”

Much later that night, after appearances at a slew of parties during which dozens of people noted with disbelief that we had lost in 8 out of 10 categories—Bugsy won only for art direction and costume design!—I ended up in Warren’s kitchen. It is the only time I have ever seen him drink to excess.

“I can’t believe we got robbed the way we did,” I said. “But, on the other hand, I can. And in a sense it’s just as well.”

Warren looked at me as if I had two heads. “How do you figure that?”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, finally. “Uh-huh. I’m going to bed.”

He left the kitchen and that was that. My vacation was over.

As I look back, what I couldn’t explain was that righteous indignation is a more reliable spur to new creation than complacent self-regard.

From Tyson to Baldwin

At the end of every cinematic adventure, any original filmmaker who maintains even the most fragile grip on reality secretly suspects that there may never be another movie. Before even addressing the question of money, there is the more essential matter: What is this next movie going to be? In 2007, for the 12th time in 35 years, I was able to come up with an answer, in the form of what seemed then to be the tragic case of Mike Tyson.

Tyson and I had begun an emotionally intense, intellectually surprising friendship in 1985 when he came to visit Downey at the Museum of Natural History, in New York, where we were shooting a scene for The Pick-Up Artist. Thirteen years later, a period during which they each served some prison time, I put them together in my film Black and White. In an electrically charged, entirely improvised scene, Downey—as the gay husband of Brooke Shields’s character—hits on Tyson until Tyson erupts, smacking Downey in the face and choking him. In a subsequent scene, Tyson gives advice to Wu-Tang Clan’s Power on the risks of murder and the horrors of “the penitentiary.” Together, these scenes and the personal sense I had gained over time convinced me that if I could shoot Tyson for a week I could construct a unique film from it. The result was Tyson, which won a special prize at Cannes in 2008.

The transition to the next film was even smoother. While Tyson was playing at the 2009 Hamptons Film Festival, Alec Baldwin was approaching me during the opening-night party. We had met casually a few times over the years, and I had always responded to him on the screen. He is both a terrific actor and a star, one of the few personalities capable of bringing skill and credibility in equal measure to both dark and comic roles. He seemed smart, as if he had more than a few hidden insights up his sleeve. We vowed to meet for lunch when we were back in New York, which led to dozens of lunches and dinners, nearly always at the Harvard Club, where I would play host, or the Grand Havana Room, Alec’s haunt, where he could indulge his cigar yearnings.

The subjects of these encounters ranged radically: movies, politics, sex, religion, Hollywood, and, my own favorite, death. One day I blurted out what in retrospect sounds like a manifesto of mutual self-congratulation: “It’s crazy for us to be wasting all this great stuff. We should be shooting it.”

Alec smiled in amusement at the conspicuous absence of irony with which this grand claim had been delivered.

“You mean we owe it to posterity.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way in public.”

“What kind of movie did you have in mind?”

Alec’s question led to at least five cinematic ideas over the next several months, none of which outlived the lunch or dinner over which they were proposed, partly because they seemed beyond realistic financial reach, a frustrating recognition tinged with a dose of embarrassment and anger which led to the notion of doing a film precisely about that difficulty. How does one navigate one’s way through today’s film universe from idea to reality? The location for such an exploration announced itself with immediate clarity: the Cannes Film Festival.

Surprisingly, Alec had never been to Cannes—in fact, he had never been to the Riviera—which promised to become an added virtue of the conception. Perhaps most alluring was the prospect of inventing a film outside all categories—not a documentary, not a fiction feature—a film to be discovered during the process of shooting and editing. The title, Seduced and Abandoned (also the title of a fine but entirely different Pietro Germi film made 50 years ago), was fertilized by a metaphor in Alec’s brain: that film/movies/Hollywood are like an irresistible lover who keeps luring you back no matter how many times you swear to yourself you’re never going to return. The MacGuffin for Seduced and Abandoned would involve Alec and at least one other actor traveling to Cannes to raise money for a future movie, a political-romantic drama inspired by Last Tango in Paris set in postwar Iraq. The working title was Last Tango in Tikrit. Alec insisted that our quest be real, that we make a genuine effort to get the financing for Last Tango in Tikrit, at a budget of $15 to $20 million.

The question of Alec’s fund-raising traveling companion, the other half of the Hope-Crosby—or Quixote-Panza—duo floated around for another month until a sudden inspiration invaded my consciousness: the logical choice for “the other guy” was actually me.

“I have a great idea for the partner,” I announced.

“Who?” Alec asked eagerly.

I waited a few pregnant beats. “Moi.”

He smiled. “Vous?”

“Oui.”

I waited for an objection. There was none. A trio of virgin investors—Alan Helene, a real-estate developer, Larry Herbert, an inventor and philanthropist, and Neal Schneider, a hedge-fund whiz from Chicago—agreed to share the $2 million cost and we were off.

The blissfully irrational sense of excitement Alec and I felt as our primary emotion as the start of shooting approached—the normal mode is wary optimism—can be explained only as a characteristically defiant attitude to the legitimate possibility of catastrophe.

“We want to have fun with this movie,” Alec said, “and obviously we want the audience to have fun as well. But it’s only going to be worth doing if it’s something completely new, if we give a true picture of the movie world today, which means, apart from going on our quest, that we must provide a forum for some great directors and actors and for some of the executives who have—and still do—run the show from the business side.”

Having connected over many years with Francis Ford Coppola and Marty Scorsese, and having found access through my agent of 35 years—Jeff Berg—to his clients Roman Polanski and Bernardo Bertolucci, it turned out to be oddly simple to induce them to appear in the film and equally easy, once they were in front of the camera, to get them to open up with elegant wit and no guile. Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain, James Caan—shivers of nostalgia from our Gambler days—Diane Kruger, and the luminous Bérénice Bejo all feel real even as they perform. And Mike Medavoy (now a producer), Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Ron Meyer, vice-chairman of NBCUniversal, all clearly relish the chance to be seen and heard instead of just watching and listening. Meyer, the former president of CAA and probably the best-liked Hollywood executive over the past 40 years, makes a remarkable admission, one that comes as close to defining the Hollywood studio way of functioning today as any I have heard: “If I love a movie and everybody else hates it, we don’t make that movie.”

Seduced and Abandoned, shot during the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, had its premiere at the 2013 festival, and the response from critics and audiences was—if a word of immodesty may be indulged—rhapsodic. HBO, through its peerlessly intelligent C.E.O., Richard Plepler, made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

“I promise you,” Plepler said, “because of HBO On Demand and HBO Go, eventually more people will see Seduced and Abandoned than all your other movies combined.”

As I am always as inclined to believe good news as I am disinclined to believe anything I don’t want to hear, I readily accepted this prediction and only recently was greeted by Ron Meyer at the Waverly Inn, where we both happened to be dining.

“In my 18 years at Universal,” he said, “I’ve received more calls about Seduced and Abandoned than I have for any movie I’ve made at the studio.”

Even if it was a slight exaggeration, it was enough to send me off into the future ready and eager—as I always hope to be, as I can’t imagine not being—for more.